Segregation Nation

by Jacob Davies

Some maps of the racial make-up of American cities by a guy called Eric Fisher.

Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.

New York City:

Detroit:

The SF Bay Area:

Click on any of them for bigger images and many more maps of other cities.

I don't have an editorial comment, I just think they're really striking maps. I live on the island of Alameda, which is the mostly-red-with-a-little-bit-of-green blob right in the center of the last map there. Well, okay, one comment, which is that the title is a bit unfair; I don't think there are any other countries with much better integration than the US. Race is a really easy in-/out-group marker...

Comments

[tarylcabot]

I'm curious how "calibasians" are treated - are the white dots from folks who "decline to state"?

Would also be curious to see my current city of Los Angeles; my area of town has a large population of Iranian Jews - would their dots be "white" or "asian".

Won't argue that segregation is a non-reality, but believe the chart is at least a bit misleading knowing the number of children of mixed marriages that i can think of.

[Blue dot in Oakland]

Pretty amazing! I am most familiar with the SF Bay Area. You can see two small clusters of blue dots in the red sea that is Marin County (north side of Golden Gate Bridge). The one near Sausalito is Marin City, a small unincorporated community where black shipyard workers were permitted to live during WW II and stayed after the war (a public housing project was also built there during the 60s), the other is San Quentin Prison.

[Jacob Davies]

I don't think it counts members of any groups not specified, so no Arabs, and there are no white dots - that's just the empty area.

LA:

[Phil]

Won't argue that segregation is a non-reality, but believe the chart is at least a bit misleading knowing the number of children of mixed marriages that i can think of.

It comes from Census data. If a family with "mixed-race" children (oh, how I hate that phrase) reports them as black, they show up as black. If they report them as white, they show up as white. And so forth. It's only "misleading" to the extent that you think people don't know what color their own children are.

Clicking through and viewing the Cleveland map confirmed that the city remains one of the most segregated in the US. Nearly all its black residents are on the East Side of the Cuyahoga River (as am I), and confined to a few neighborhoods.

[Blue dot in Oakland]

Won't argue that segregation is a non-reality, but believe the chart is at least a bit misleading knowing the number of children of mixed marriages that i can think of.

I assume that census information is the source data used for these visualizations. Most people identify with a single category, by choice. The number of people who "decline to state" is vanishingly small. A slightly larger number select multiple categories. If 50 people in an area select, say, both "white" and "Asian", I suspect you'd end up with one red and one green dot.

In my own household, my wife has blonde hair, blue eyes, and self-identifies as "white", our daughter has blonde hair, blue eyes, and self-identifies as "black". How people decide to self-identify may be fuzzy at the edges, but as the maps and history suggests, there's more at work here than just happenstance...

[DWhite]

I guess we just don't want to live side by side, in general.

[Jacob Davies]

OK, one or two editorial comments. The Bay Area data shows (I think) the process of Asians becoming white. San Francisco and the peninsula are heavily Asian and white but pretty mixed up.

Downtown Oakland is genuinely pretty diverse which matches my experience. Berkeley is much more black than most people realize and also more mixed-up than, say, East Oakland. In the Bay Area as in LA, there's a lot of mixing of blacks and Hispanics which looks like being much less the case elsewhere.

Also backs up my experience of the East Bay versus San Francisco versus Margin: SF is all rich white and Asian people except in the Mission and Hunter's Point and a couple of housing projects. The East Bay is much more mixed up, but still sorts largely into white people who live on higher ground and black/Asian/Hispanic people who live in the flatlands. And Marin is white.

The redlines in Detroit are stark. It's impossible to see lines like that as the result of undirected sorting.

[Harald Korneliussen]

What on earth is the explanation for that straight line between red and blue in Detroit? In the other towns the borders seem a lot fuzzier.

[tarylcabot]

It's only "misleading" to the extent that you think people don't know what color their own children are.

Now curious to ask my Persian co-worker who is married to a Hispanic what they put on their census for race.

Looking on Wikipedia, I read that 2.3% of the US is "two or more ethnic groups" & 4.9% is "some other race".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

[ajay]

Well, okay, one comment, which is that the title is a bit unfair; I don't think there are any other countries with much better integration than the US.

I would be amazed if the map of London looks anything like the map of New York or Detroit. Even the most heavily black areas (like Brixton) have large white and desi populations.

[liberal japonicus]

Eyeballing these graphics, I'm not sure if that is true about London.

[ajay]

Actually, lj, I think that link backs me up: none of the areas of London marked are more than 36% black. And even Banglatown around Brick Lane is less than 60% Bangladeshi.
Looking at the pictures above, central Detroit south of 8 Mile Road seems to be basically all black. There's nothing like that in London.

[Slartibartfast]

What on earth is the explanation for that straight line between red and blue in Detroit?

I'm guessing it's 8 Mile Road.

[Hartmut]

On the street level it might look different. Over here (Berlin, Germany) we have areas where one would assume to be in Istanbul because Turkish shops etc. totally dominate but demographically those areas are still mixed. Most Turks live in these areas (and culturally dominate them) but they are probably not a majority even there. I guess in the US the ethnic geographical division is stronger due to a) Whites trying to exclude non-Whites from their areas b) minorities clogging together as a means of self-protection (there are of course other reasons too like affordability etc.).

[liberal japonicus]

Looking at the charts more closely (some of the colored areas on the map represent 6%-33%. Pretty big spread) I see the point Ajay is making. However, the charts also gives the white population of some districts as being 98%. So, perhaps there are fewer neighborhoods that are even a majority black/colored, but there may be a lot that are really lily white. This may be a function of the fact that the percentage of whites is much greater in the UK that in the US. (2001, 87% of the English population self identifies as White British/ 2000 census had European Americans as only 62% and this leaves out White Irish) and minority percentages are higher and presumably, urban areas would have more of a concentration of minorities. This leads to a larger population to form enclaves in the US and in the UK, there lacks the critical mass to form such an enclave, as well as a shorter history in which to create those enclaves, such as the lower 9th in New Orleans or Watts in LA.

[ajay]

Hmm, maybe. As in yes, there are fewer non-whites in the UK; but I'm not sure that there hasn't been enough time for enclaves to form. England's had large-scale immigration from the Caribbean for the last sixty years, after all. I bet Detroit didn't look like that in 1947.
White flight, in other words, just hasn't happened in London to the same extent as in US cities. Or at least that's what these maps seem to suggest. British urban whites seem a lot happier living alongside non-whites (and vice versa) than is the case in the US. And by "alongside" I mean "in the same house"; intermarriage rates are far higher in the UK. One in three children of a black parent in the UK have a white parent.

[liberal japonicus]

Actually, I think that the influx of people occurred in cities like Detroit and Chicago first with post Civil War period and then during WWII to work in war production and the post war period created the first wave of white flight to the suburbs. And while an additional half century may not seem like a long time, given that this was the time when most of the cities were being constructed, it served to set racial attitudes in concrete. And my feeling is that intermarriage rates are subject to tipping point phenomenon. When the minority is not as numerous, it is much easier to assimilate them into society. Frex, the first interracial kiss on TV in the US was in Star Trek in 1967, (though the episode was not broadcast in many places in the South) and is relatively well known as a landmark, but the first interracial kiss in a UK TV broadcast was in 1964 as part of a long term interracial relationship and has none of the Star Trek kiss iconic status.

My point, I suppose, is not to try and downgrade the open mindedness of Brits, but more to suggest that a lot of prejudice is the result of demographics impinging on social constructs, rather than a particular failing on the part of one group of people. At least that is my take.

[ajay]

I tell you one place in the UK where the maps would look like Detroit: Belfast. (If the dots were green for Catholic and orange for Protestant, that is.) Very, very clear delineations in that city, even before they started putting the Peace Walls up.

[wj]

One other weakness in the data. I live over the hills, about 20 miles east of Jacob. If you look at the map, it's pretty much all white, with a scattering of Hispanic (many of whom are families which were here before California was). But blacks and Asians are essentially invisible . . . until you walk down the street. The reason, as far as I can determine, is too much integration. Both groups are so integrated that you easily end up not having a significant number (i.e over 25, or at least enough sets of 25 to give a set of dots that are visible) in any given census track.

[tarylcabot]

I went through more or Eric's photos & it found Anchorage to be quite interesting (see link) - they have a fairly good mixture of grey & red dots for a section of their city (grey is none of the other 4 so must mean Eskimo).

Additionally, I chatted with a Kurdish fellow that i work with & he stated that he put down "white" for race on the census.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5010397761/

[Gary Farber]

"Frex, the first interracial kiss on TV in the US was in Star Trek in 1967, (though the episode was not broadcast in many places in the South)"

I'm afraid you're misinformed as regards your parenthetical comment, LJ. That's a myth.

Not only did no station not broadcast it (and, really, how would they know what would happen in an episode they hadn't broadcast yet, anyway?), but there's no record of NBC ever receiving more than a single letter of complaint.

And if we really want to mythbust, it also wasn't the first "interracial" kiss on tv, anyway:

[...] This is often cited as the first interracial kiss depicted on a scripted television series,[2][1] but took place after Sammy Davis, Jr. had briefly kissed Nancy Sinatra on the variety program Movin' With Nancy in December 1967.[3]

Please forgive me stepping in when the conversation turns to truly earth-shaking points of fact.

[Gary Farber]

Also, "Plato's Stepchildren," the Star Trek episode in question was first broadcast November 22, 1968, not in 1967.